I’ve been looking into contemporary textbooks on operating systems and found this free, online text. The authors now teach at Duke and are gracious to make their book free. Kudos to the Arpaci-Dusseau team!

From their web page…

Welcome to Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces (now version 0.6 — see BOOK NEWS for details), a free online (and available for purchase in printed form) operating systems book! The book is centered around three conceptual pieces that are fundamental to operating systems: virtualization, concurrency, and persistence. In understanding the conceptual, you will also learn the practical, including how an operating system does things like schedule the CPU, manage memory, and store files persistently. Lots of fun stuff!

Windows is moving towards a more locked-down direction with Windows 8 and its Start screen and “Modern” app environment. There’s no denying this — you can’t even set a custom Start screen background without installing a third-party utility. Luckily, Windows hasn’t completely shed its legacy of customizability, yet. There are many different hacks you can perform with the Start screen, although most of them should have been included with Windows 8 itself.

When Microsoft shipped Windows 2000 and Active Directory, Apple didn’t really have a solution for identity management or for linking Macs to an enterprise network. The company was just beginning the transition from its classic Mac OS—the first version of which had shipped on the first Mac in 1984—to OS X. Although Apple did ship a public beta of OS X in second half of the year, the final release didn’t arrive until March 2001.

In a startling and unexpected announcement, Microsoft revealed today that CEO Steve Ballmer would retire sometime in the next 12 months. During the intervening time, the company will begin a search for his successor.

Alex Polvi is living the great Silicon Valley archetype. Together with some old school friends, he’s piecing together a tech revolution from inside a two-car Palo Alto garage.

He’s like Dave Packard or Steve Jobs or Sergey Brin — at least up to a point. The difference is that, from his vantage point here in the 21st century, Polvi views his garage with a certain sense of irony — “straight-up Palo Alto-style,” he says — and he harbors ambitions that suit our particular time. He wants to change the way we build the entire internet, making this worldwide network of computer servers as easy to update as the browsers on our laptops.